The referee might miss an occasional handball, but a soccer game isn’t rigged in favor of one group of players over another. Unlike a soccer game, the most powerful economic actors have rigged the labor market against everyday hardworking Americans.

In June, the economy added a disappointing 223,000 payroll jobs and the more optimistic gains for May were substantially revised downwards from 280,000 to 254,000, on top of downward revisions for April.

Average hourly earnings hit $24.96 in May, an increase of 2.3 percent over May 2014. We’ve been tracking nominal wage growth over the recovery and at best we can find reason for only a very modest celebration. 2.3 percent growth is a move in the right direction, but it’s nowhere near the 3.5 to 4.0 percent growth we expect in a healthy labor market.

The weak labor market has sidelined millions of “missing workers,” or potential workers who, because of weak job opportunities, are neither employed nor actively seeking a job. An increase in optimism about the labor market leads to more people actively seeking employment.

In tomorrow’s release of the Employment Report, I’m primarily looking for evidence confirming that the Federal Reserve should continue to stay the course through its June (and most likely September) meeting. I’ll also be looking more closely at the labor market for young people: youth entering the labor market in the summer and prospects for recent high school grads.

Today's young college graduates face a more challenging labor market—higher unemployment, higher underemployment, and lower wages—than their older siblings did before the Great Recession. While wage stagnation is not unique to the newest labor market entrants, what is particularly stunning is the fact that stark wage disparities between men and women occur even at this early part of their careers.

The fact is that wage and income inequality didn’t happen by accident; they are the result of intentional policy decisions that have shifted bargaining power away from workers. So along with fighting to alleviate poverty through a stronger safety net, we should use all the tools available to raise America’s pay and raise Americans out of poverty.

Due to the progression of the economic recovery and a modest improvement in the unemployment rate, members of the Class of 2015 currently have better job prospects than the classes of 2009–2014. However, the Class of 2015 still faces real economic challenges, as evidenced by elevated levels of unemployment and underemployment, and a large share of graduates who still remain “idled” by the economy.

That the poverty rate has remained stubbornly elevated over the last three-and-a-half decades is simply a symptom of an increasingly unequal economy, marked by nearly stagnant hourly wages for the vast majority of the American workforce.

Applying EPI's family budget thresholds to Census Bureau data on Denver shows that many—indeed, more than 40 percent—of the region’s residents are struggling to achieve economic security. As policymakers in Denver consider measures to raise incomes for area residents, they should be fully aware of just how far many in the community are from this benchmark.

Despite what some policymakers and pundits might have us believe, a significant share of the poor work. This means that policies that boost employment and wages are important and underappreciated tools for reducing poverty.

Nominal wage growth’s failure to significantly increase over the last several months (and years) is evidence enough that there’s sufficient labor market slack to convince the Federal Reserve to keep its foot off the economic brakes and not increase short-term interest rates.

This morning’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report rounds out the employment situation for March. Last week, we saw substantial downward revisions to payroll employment, revisions that exposed one of the slowest job gains in recent years.

Over the last year, and, in fact, over the last five years, nominal wage growth has been slow—slow by historic standards and slow relative to wage growth that would be consistent with the Fed’s 2 percent overall price inflation target.

Wages in "right-to-work" (RTW) states are 3.1 percent lower than those in non-RTW states, after controlling for a full complement of individual demographic and socioeconomic factors as well as state macroeconomic indicators. This translates into RTW being associated with $1,558 lower annual wages for a typical full-time, full-year worker.

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Economic Policy Institute

EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.